Brendan Ball's Blog o-iii<0https://brendanball.com
Trumpeter, Urban Farmer & Art Enthusiast. Brendan plays exclusively on trumpet mouthpieces custom made for him by Toshiaki Kameyama! All images on the site are copyright to Brendan. Please credit any useage, or ask.Wed, 23 May 2018 01:17:30 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/d598df899e53ca337165fc8bb597a529?s=96&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs0.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngBrendan Ball's Blog o-iii<0https://brendanball.com
The Consequences Of Fallinghttps://brendanball.com/2017/04/17/the-consequences-of-falling/
https://brendanball.com/2017/04/17/the-consequences-of-falling/#respondMon, 17 Apr 2017 13:35:42 +0000http://brendanball.com/?p=13431Continue reading →]]>A great piece from Ailís Ní Ríain. We toured ‘The Consequences of Falling’ as part of the Delia Darlings Tour 2013-2014. This extract was recorded during the gig in London 2014 at The Horse Hospital. The music was inspired by the music of Delia Derbyshire (especially from ‘Pot Au Feu) and portrays two ‘tape’ machines that go in and out of sync. Sorry about the audible groan at the end but it was quite a challenging ten minute work!

<p><a href=”https://vimeo.com/145144274″>The Consequences of Falling (extract)</a> from <a href=”https://vimeo.com/ailis”>Ail&iacute;s N&iacute; R&iacute;ain</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>
]]>https://brendanball.com/2017/04/17/the-consequences-of-falling/feed/0brendanballThe Acrobat Challengehttps://brendanball.com/2017/04/15/the-acrobat-challenge/
https://brendanball.com/2017/04/15/the-acrobat-challenge/#respondSat, 15 Apr 2017 20:29:43 +0000http://brendanball.com/?p=13411Continue reading →]]>Young trombone virtuoso, Stephen Sykes, is fighting for his life from a rare form of cancer. To help Stephen get treatment, trombonists and brass players from all over the world have been taking The Acrobat Challenge. This is my contribution…

]]>https://brendanball.com/2017/04/15/the-acrobat-challenge/feed/0brendanballWatch Out! They’ll be ‘avin’ yer!https://brendanball.com/2017/04/06/watch-out-theyll-be-avin-yer/
https://brendanball.com/2017/04/06/watch-out-theyll-be-avin-yer/#respondThu, 06 Apr 2017 14:12:22 +0000http://brendanball.com/?p=13403Continue reading →]]>As much as one may dislike hearing people playing the bugle, I think this level of police intervention should be reserved for those found guilty of committing bagpipe practice.

That’s the trouble with buglers: they’re only as good as their Last Post!

As a boy growing up in New Orleans, I remember my father, Ellis, a pianist, and his friends talking about “sheddin’.” When they got together, theyʼd say, “Man, you need to go shed,” or “I’ve been sheddin’ hard.” When I was around 11, I realized that sheddin’ meant getting to the woodshed – practicing. By the age of 16, I understood what the shed was really about – hard, concentrated work. When my brother Branford and I auditioned for our high school band, the instructor, who knew my father, was excited about Ellisʼ sons coming to the band. But my audition was so pitiful he said, “Are you sure youʼre Ellis’ son?”

At the time, his comment didn’t bother me because I was more interested in basketball than band. Over the next several years, however, I began practicing seriously. Practice is essential to learning music – and anything else, for that matter. I like to say that the time spent practicing is the true sign of virtue in a musician. When you practice, it means you are willing to sacrifice to sound good.

Even if practice is so important, kids find it very hard to do because there are so many distractions. Thatʼs why I always encourage them to practice and explain how to do it. I’ve developed what I call “Wynton’s 12 Ways to Practice.” These will work for almost every activity – from music to schoolwork to sports.

Wyntonʼs Twelve Ways to Practice: From Music to Schoolwork
Published in the Education Digest | Sept 1996

1. Seek out instruction: Find an experienced teacher who knows what you should be doing. A good teacher will help you understand the purpose of practicing and can teach you ways to make practicing easier and more productive.

2. Write out a schedule: A schedule helps you organize your time. Be sure to allow time to review the fundamentals because they are the foundation of all the complicated things that come later. If you are practicing basketball, for example, be sure to put time in your schedule to practice free throws.

3. Set goals: Like a schedule, goals help you organize your time and chart your progress. Goals also act as a challenge: something to strive for in a specific period of time. If a certain task turns out to be really difficult, relax your goals: practice doesnʼt have to be painful to achieve results.

4. Concentrate: You can do more in 10 minutes of focused practice than in an hour of sighing and moaning. This means no video games, no television, no radio, just sitting still and working. Start by concentrating for a few minutes at a time and work up to longer periods gradually. Concentrated effort takes practice too, especially for young people.

5. Relax and practice slowly: Take your time; donʼt rush through things. Whenever you set out to learn something new – practicing scales, multiplication tables, verb tenses in Spanish – you need to start slowly and build up speed.

7. Practice with expression: Every day you walk around making yourself into “you,” so do everything with the proper attitude. Put all of yourself into participating and try to do your best, no matter how insignificant the task may seem. Express your “style” through how you do what you do.

8. Learn from your mistakes: None of us are perfect, but donʼt be too hard on yourself. If you drop a touchdown pass, or strike out to end the game, itʼs not the end of the world. Pick yourself up, analyze what went wrong and keep going. Most people work in groups or as part of teams. If you focus on your contributions to the overall effort, your personal mistakes wonʼt seem so terrible.

9. Donʼt show off: Itʼs hard to resist showing off when you can do something well. In high school, I learned a breathing technique so I could play a continuous trumpet solo for 10 minutes without stopping for a breath. But my father told me, “Son, those who play for applause, thatʼs all they get.” When you get caught up in doing the tricky stuff, youʼre just cheating yourself and your audience.

10. Think for yourself: Your success or failure at anything ultimately depends on your ability to solve problems, so donʼt become a robot. Think about Dick Fosbury, who invented the Fosbury Flop for the high jump. Everyone used to run up to the bar and jump over it forwards. Then Fosbury came along and jumped over the bar backwards, because he could go higher that way. Thinking for yourself helps develop your powers of judgment. Sometimes you may judge wrong and pay the price; but when you judge right you reap the rewards.

11. Be optimistic: How you feel about the world expresses who you are. When you are optimistic, things are either wonderful or becoming wonderful. Optimism helps you get over your mistakes and go on to do better. It also gives you endurance because having a positive attitude makes you feel that something great is always about to happen.

12. Look for connections: No matter what you practice, youʼll find that practicing itself relates to everything else. It takes practice to learn a language, cook good meals or get along well with people. If you develop the discipline it takes to become good at something, that discipline will help you in whatever else you do. Itʼs important to understand that kind of connection. The more you discover the relationships between things that at first seem different, the larger your world becomes. In other words, the woodshed can open up a whole world of possibilities.

]]>https://brendanball.com/2017/03/24/contra-bass-trumpet/feed/1brendanballGracie Fields Train…https://brendanball.com/2017/03/19/gracie-fields-train/
https://brendanball.com/2017/03/19/gracie-fields-train/#respondSun, 19 Mar 2017 19:36:59 +0000http://brendanball.com/?p=13372Continue reading →]]>I arrived back from Germany the other day. I swapped the aeroplane for a train at Manchester for the last leg of my journey home to Liverpool. I was delighted to see that, although badly faded, the train was dedicated to Gracie Fields.

Dame Gracie Fields, DBE (born Grace Stansfield; 9 January 1898 – 27 September 1979) was an English actress, singer and comedian and star of both cinema and music hall. She spent the later part of her life on the isle of Capri, Italy. Fields was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for “services to entertainment” in 1938, and in 1979, seven months before her death, she was invested a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II.

The final few lines of Gracie’s famous song “Sally” were written by her husband’s mistress, Annie Lipman, which Fields sang at every performance from 1931 onwards – claiming in later life that she wanted to “Drown blasted Sally with Walter with the aspidistra on top!”, a reference to two other of her well-known songs, “Walter, Walter”, and “It’s the Biggest Aspidistra in the World.”

]]>https://brendanball.com/2017/03/19/gracie-fields-train/feed/0brendanball17361740_1433843963326455_5018036715353818100_n.jpgA Musical Joke…https://brendanball.com/2017/03/17/a-musical-joke-3/
https://brendanball.com/2017/03/17/a-musical-joke-3/#respondFri, 17 Mar 2017 23:50:43 +0000http://brendanball.com/?p=13367Continue reading →]]>Ben came into the house with a new harmonica.

‘Grandpa, do you mind if I play this in here?’

‘Of course not, Ben. I love music. In fact, when your Grandma and I were young, music saved my life.’

‘What happened?’

‘Well, it was during the famous Johnstown flood. The dam broke, and when the water hit our house, it knocked it right off the foundation. Grandma got on the dining room table and floated out safely.’